Helpful in Hindsight No.1

This is the first article in the Helpful in Hindsight Series. Helpful in Hindsight is a compendium of useful online resources relating to Automated Testing, Theory of Testing, BDD, ATTD, TTD and other topics of interest. It is designed to be a resource library, where people can access Best Practice advice and useful hints & tips, from recognised industry experts.

Testing and Learning

Markus Gartner discusses how Software Testers can go from Good to Great. He has created a hierarchy of testing 'experience', based on three general skill-levels: Beginners, Practitioners, and Journeymen. Interestingly, he does not discuss what it takes to become and expert, or a 'Testing Guru'.

Beginners need to learn everything, and benefit from working alongside experienced Practitioners.

Practitioners have a good depth of knowledge about testing, and need to begin actively participating in the testing community. They should try new things, seek to innovate, and broaden the breadth of their knowledge.

The Journeyman is an experienced Tester - they need to use that experience to learn more about theory and methodology of testing, and should be able to analyze that information critically.

Garnter believes "We should focus more on teaching testers how to evaluate their situation, and make useful improvements to their work where it is appropriate"

Testing V. Checking

Alister Scott, at WatirMelon, discusses the Checking V. Testing debate. He argues that current test 'experts', like James Bach and Micheal Bolton, are over emphasizing the confusion people have between checking and testing. Scott believes that we need to define new terms for the work that contemporary testers undertake. This blog has a lively comments section, with varied and interesting responses to the blog's topic.Read more here

Interview with Cem Kaner

Cem Kaner talks about the Domain Testing Workbook, teaching testing, and emerging trends in testing. In particular, he focuses on the social side - the testing community. He discusses how testing is becoming polarized and adversarial in its approach. (You can see an example of this, in the comments on Waitrmelon Blog).

OpenStack

Silconangle looks into OpenStack, and how it will change the face of the public cloud provision. With its Open Source nature, Siconangle expect OpenStack to begin actively competing with AWS in 2014. The driver behind this will be the independence that OpenStack brings, data localization, and feature growth.